An Interview with Richard Ford

AN INTERVIEW WITH RICHARD FORD Richard Ford Richard Ford is the author of several books, including A Piece of My Heart, The Ultimate Good Luck, and The Sportswriter. This interview was conducted by Kay Bonetti, Director of the American Audio Prose Library Series. The Prose Library offers tapes of American authors reading and discussing their work. For information, contact AAPL, PO Box 842, Columbia, MO 65205. An Interview with Richard Ford / Kay Bonetti Interviewer: Why do you live where you live? Ford: When I left Mississippi in 1962, it was kind of an awful place, for me, and I was curious to know if I could come back and be the kind of fellow I had become. It's kind of an experiment of the heart, in a way. Interviewer: This is the place of A Piece of My Heart, isn't it? Ford: Just about ten miles away. Quite by coincidence, when I grew up in Mississippi, I lived down in Jackson. I was always fond of the Delta, but I never thought about living here until after my mother died. I came back to Mississippi thinking that if I didn't find some way to attach myself here, I would go away and lose Mississippi forever. I would have to make some willful act to continue my associations with Mississippians. So I came to the Delta because it seemed like the prettiest place in the state to live. Interviewer: You have said that place is wherever we can gain dominion over our subject and make it convincing. Ford: That's right, that's right. I think that you have to be imaginative in your relationship with place. You have to be sensitive to the fact that it makes a claim on you and then try to make up what that claim is. Otherwise, you're left reliant upon the conventional wisdom, which is where, of course, literature falls apart, where imaginative writing is defeated. Interviewer: How does a piece set itself for you? Ford: Oh—that's actually a very hard question. I guess it sets itself for me without ever becoming conceptualized; you can't abstract a sense of place. Someone else can do it; the critic can do it. But for me, a place makes itself felt entirely through particulars. I don't ever think The Missouri Review · 71 about, say, writing stories about Montana in terms of writing stories about Montana. I just am in Montana and the things that appeal to me go into stories. Interviewer: You mean you are in Montana in your mind, or— Ford: When I want to write a story about Montana I can do that, yeah. I can be in Mississippi and write about Montana. I wrote "Communist ," as a matter of fact, sitting in this very house. Interviewer: The Sports Writer, too, I imagine. Ford: I started it in New Jersey, and wrote most of it in Montana, then I finished it down here in Mississippi. I've got in my notebook a whole lot of details, and that's really where that sense of place comes from. As I get older, I think it's true, too, that I hang out in fewer and fewer places that I don't like. I try to go to the places where I am willing to be attentive, where I am willing to participate in the life there and to notice what is going on; a writer's obligation is to pay attention. I don't pay a great deal of attention in Mississippi anymore. I figure, by and large, that I've written the one piece about Mississippi that Tm happy ever to write. Interviewer: And that's A Piece of My Heart? Ford: That's A Piece ofMy Heart. "Shooting the Rest Area," which was in The Paris Review twelve or so years ago, was really just a kind of a precis piece for A Piece of My Heart. I'm not in Mississippi to write about it. Interviewer: You said you keep a notebook. 72 · The Missouri Review Richard Ford "I try to go to places where Iam willing to be attentive." Ford: I always have, in...